I was going to do a quick re-cap of search engine history with this post, but in doing a bit of research I realized that for most business folks the history isn’t quite as important as knowing how searches work today.
So if you’re curious about the complete, no-geeks-barred history of search engines, read this.
Let’s look at some basics. First - we need to define an “index”, as that’s a word that gets tossed about when discussing search engines. There are much geekier definitions of index, but for our purposes we can define it this way:
Index:
A list of web pages that a given search engine draws from when getting results for your search.
So when you click the “Google Results” button after typing in a search phrase, Google is taking that combination of words you entered and looking through it’s index for pages to bring back to you.
There are two ways that search companies build their indexes; either humans do it by hand or a computer is setup with an automated process.
Yahoo! is probably the most well known hand-built directory. Yahoo! started as a list of links to favorite web sites maintained by it’s founders—David Filo and Jerry Yang. As more and more links were added to their index, it was no longer easily “browseable” and they had to put a search function over it. You can still browse, if you prefer. Another example of a hand-built index is the Open Directory Project, which is a not-for-profit index maintained by a staff of volunteers.
Next week we’ll look at the automated way of building search indexes.
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